Solzhenitsyn's literary legacy

Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Photograph: Rex Features

Solzhenitsyn's literary career spans more than 60 years, from verse he composed and memorised in prison and the camps before Stalin's death, to the handful of short stories and novellas (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matriona's Yard) of the 1960s which propelled him to fame, together with Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation, and the major novels, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), composed simultaneously with the monumental historical documentation of Stalin's political penal system The Gulag Archipelago (1973-8).

After his deportation, by the more consistently intolerant Brezhnev, to Frankfurt and then the USA in 1974, he continued for 15 years writing a massive cycle of historical novels, Red Wheel, of which the first, August 1914 (1971), is perhaps the only one that more than a handful of readers have ploughed through. Returning to Russia in 1994, at first to loud acclaim, he became more of a political pamphleteer, the only significant work being his controversial two volumes about the Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together (2001-2).

A literary assessment of Solzhenitsyn's life work will be selective and sometimes harsh. The short stories and novellas of the 1960s are written very powerfully, combining personal witness with forthright clarity. Their bias is as much against the intellectuals who collaborated (even if they too paid for it) with the system, as against totalitarianism itself, and an underlying Christian asceticism informs them. They will last as examples of the most courageous prose ever published in the USSR. The novel (published abroad) In the First Circle deals with awkward intellectual dissidents very like the author, faced with the moral quandary of helping the authorities devise more effective means of oppression, or going to probable death in the camps. Its tour de force is in the best tradition of Tolstoy, a portrait of the tyrant, Stalin, as an inadequate psychopathic bully. Cancer Ward has a solitary hero defeating cancer just as he survives repression: an ode, like A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, to the innate vitality of the Russian. The novels' weaknesses lie in their lack of subtlety, particularly in dealing with the female characters; their strength in the simplicity of their allegory. One deals with stoicism, classical and genuine, the other with the totalitarian world as a hospital from which very few, including the doctors, will come out alive.

Certainly the volumes of The Gulag Archipelago will stand out as a unique and badly needed monument to Stalinism, compiled from thousands of accounts of how victims (but not their relatives) perished and survived over more than 30 years of horrific oppression. The stories of Varlam Shalamov, based on decades in the Kolyma camps, may be more honest (and depressing) still because they lack Solzhenitsyn's insistence on Christian hope and the work ethic. But Gulag Archipelago remains a towering achievement, and its composition a Herculean task that no other single person could have undertaken.

Abroad, Solzhenitsyn appeared to stop developing, or even observing. The historical cycle Red Wheel is, even to admirers almost unreadable in its mass of detail and its tendency to rant, not narrate. Solzhenitsyn's political views, scattered in hundreds of newspaper articles, are naive, offensive and often ignorant. After 1974 he came to despise the west as much as he hated Stalinism and almost turned into a Russian chauvinist and admirer of Putin. One exception is his study of the Jews, Two Hundred Years Together, where despite trying to blame others, such as Moldavians, for the pogroms, he made a brave, competent and very readable attempt to tackle a theme too sensitive for most Russian writers. It will remain a canonical text until someone even more self-assured braves the prejudices of Russian anti-Semites, Jews and communists.

Solzhenitsyn's verse and drama will always remain secondary to his prose. His memoirs, notably A Calf Butted an Oak (1975 and 1996), are a valuable document of his battle with the Soviet authorities after Khrushchev's fall, but are marred by a cantankerous refusal to acknowledge others' good deeds and motives.

Solzhenitsyn's influence will lie exclusively in his moral courage, which inspired younger dissidents to carry on the struggle, both in literature and in the defence of human rights. As a writer, Solzhenitsyn was wholly locked into 19th century traditions, particularly the forthright, lapidary, moralising style of Lev Tolstoy. He also used the Russian classical tradition of testing among modern characters in a closed space the tenets of philosophy, and finding them wanting. His mix of fiction and history in The Red Wheel is derived from Tolstoy's War and Peace. Even his Gulag Archipelago has its literary roots not in 20th century prison literature, but in Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead. In purely literary terms, then, Solzhenitsyn is a teacher without disciples.